The Total Solar Eclipse We Deserve

Think of Monday’s event as a celestially imposed national moment of silence, a two-minute reprieve for reflection and grace.

Our current President is a man who cannot stand to be upstaged, but this is one event that he can’t control.

Photograph by lan Dyer / VWPics via AP

When Monday’s total solar eclipse gets under way, tracing an arc of
temporary night across the nation, it will come as a profound relief.
“Mr. Trump Makes a Spectacle of Himself,” ran the headline on a Times editorial earlier this week; only a greater spectacle, generated by some
larger and far more marvellous force, might allow us to briefly look
away.

The eclipse fits our historical moment disconcertingly well. It will be
American from beginning to end. It starts over the Pacific Ocean at
around dawn; becomes visible in Oregon at around nine o’clock; crosses a
dozen states, from Idaho to South Carolina; and finishes in Charleston
at four in the afternoon—the first time in our nation’s history that the
path of totality will be visible exclusively to us. Weather permitting,
an observer anywhere in North America will see at least something
remarkable: the sun reduced to a sliver, the ground carpeted with
crescents cast by the light as it passes through gaps in the leaves
overhead. But the experience of full astonishment, the privilege of
seeing the brilliant ring of the sun’s corona, will be confined to a
dozen states that, with the exception of Oregon and a small slice of
southern Illinois, voted for Donald Trump in November.

If Trump had a science adviser, which he doesn’t, he might be encouraged
to tweet that no other President in history has presided over anything
similar—not George Washington, not Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama, not
even Andrew Jackson. As a nation, we’ve seen total eclipses before, but
they’ve been infrequent, many were washouts, and none were totally ours.
The last time one visited the U.S., on July 11, 1991, viewers had to go
all the way to Hawaii to see it, only to confront clouds. The first
total solar eclipse visible in the new United States occurred on June
24, 1778; Thomas Jefferson, who was as interested in natural phenomena
as political ones, wanted very much to watch it, for the thrill of
precisely calculating his own longitude, but it was cloudy in Virginia
that day, too. Jefferson tried again with the total solar eclipse of
1806, when he was President: cloudy again. The last time a total eclipse
occurred only in America was on June 13th of the year 1257, when the
U.S. had no states and the only Americans were the original kind.

If the President had a Shakespeare adviser, which he probably doesn’t, he might be concerned by the optics of an eclipse. “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” Gloucester tells Edmund, his malevolent son, in “King Lear.” “We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.” We’ll see how the Great American Eclipse of 2017 goes. In July, Wade
Caves, an astrological consultant, posted a twenty-nine-page
analysis of the coming event that forecast trouble: “This is a time of great
strength for Mars, when he is renewed in his energy and force, and with
almost a blind naiveté dispenses martial virtue without discretion.”
(Caves also noted that Trump was born during an eclipse, albeit a lunar
one.) What’s most striking about Monday’s spectacle, though, is the
genuine excitement around it. The eclipse will be broadcast,
live-streamed, tweeted. Millions of people are expected to drive to and
plant themselves under the path of totality, forming a
seventy-mile-wide, cross-country Burning Man, or whatever the conceptual
inverse of Burning Man is—Corona Man, maybe. According to
Newsweek,
officials in several states are preparing for the eclipse as if for a
natural disaster: “Port-a-potty shortages. Cellular blackout zones.
Ambulances stuck in gridlock.” (This, too, is an American tradition: in
January of 1777, George Washington, wintering over in New Jersey, warned
his troops about an upcoming partial eclipse so that it wouldn’t “affect
the minds of the Soldiery, and be attended with some bad consequences.”)

Think of Monday’s event as a celestially imposed national moment of
silence, a two-minute reprieve for reflection and grace. It will be
unsettling, its beauty fleeting and unworldly, but in it we will see the
outlines of democracy: for a few moments, a small satellite will
overshadow a raging star a thousand times its size. (Perhaps the sun
considers this unjust, the verdict of a loser astronomy.) Our current
President is a man who cannot stand to be upstaged, but this is one
event that he can’t control. We should savor such opportunities while we
can. Each year, as Earth slows in its rotation, the moon, our weary
ally, edges an inch and a half farther away. In six hundred million
years, it will be distant enough that it will no longer fully occlude
the sun. There will be eclipses nonetheless, though not as glorious as
the one approaching; we should be so lucky as to last long enough see
them.